Last night I went with the Robles family to the shopping mall. A pretty routine experience I suppose, yet this mall is in Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. I guess a mall is a mall, yet this was a new experience even for me with gambling tables mixed with a family window shopping spree.

I was introduced to Briseida’s boyfriend Diego, 15, who plans to join the Air Force when he finishes high school. At dinner in the mall the conversation turned to college education and its out of reach tuitions for many. Diego told me that he plans to use the military service as a way to get some college education. He will serve the country and then let them pay for at least some of his advanced education. He wants to be an architect.

Briseida, 14, says that she and her family scour the internet etc. for college scholarships and loans. She loves art. Briseida and her sister Isabella (ponytail) are A students of course. Yet the high price of American advanced education has the family very focused on how they can afford to make this an option for their children.

Rocio says that it is a vicious circle. She wishes that both she and her husband Miguel had been able to afford a higher education which then would have allowed them to perhaps have the income that would have made college easier for their daughters. Yet this family is not the complaining type. They will figure it out no doubt at all.

Are the glaring lights of the casino industry and resultant temptations any place to raise a family? Rocio says “We teach our daughters right from wrong. They see it all here in Vegas. They can easily see life’s choices right up front here. They eventually would anyway.”

As an outside observer, I would not worry much. The whole family has their head on straight. They know what is up. Like so many Mexican nationals who come to the United States to work and raise families they are a hard working bunch. They are surely an integral part of the American work force who really get down and work. The fact that life might be a bit harder for them than for some perhaps more privileged does not phase them a bit. They will just do it.

Anyone I know who has a company and is hiring would do well to check out this family. Smarter, more loyal, harder working people cannot be found.

It’s true the U.S. school system is a mess, but just about anyone can go to college and I’m pretty sure that includes the Robles and their friends. Problem is, unless you are wealthy, you are likely to come out owing a lot of money and end up spending the next 10 years or so as an indentured servant to the banks. For many, it does work out best financially to indenture oneself to the military for a few years instead, though several people I’ve known who were promised an exciting new career by the recruiter ended up in the infantry riding a humvee rather than studying advanced electronics or architecture.

Here in Spain University is not as expensive as in other countries…, but now taxes are increasing a lot…
A good Public Health System and Public Education should be for everyone, and governments should invest and support them, as and investment for future…
First picture is beautiful…

this top picture, as eva says, “a keeper.” (or she was referring to other?) in my opinion, this is a classic — the car, people in the car, a long tradition, all the greats have done these — relates too to your ‘out for a family drive’ original scrapbook…

funny how the lack of the entourage has let this happen, without your fixers and drivers and assistants… one wonders how this trip would have gone had you solo’d from the get-go… certainly gone differently, maybe not “better,” and we can’t really judge out here in burnland because…

you promised, once, tech talk about the leica s2, or if not actual tech-talk, your thoughts. will that happen? not that i’ll be picking one of those up anytime soon. or in fact anytime EVER… minor question, not so important, you seem to be dragging a strobe around to light these scenes. true?

…

from introducing yourself to a desk-clerk in training to making these series of family portraits. you DO have a gift, not all of us are so un-shy…

i have thought a lot about this…most of my work most of my life has been while i was working alone….the “entourage” was intended as an “extended family” and i think a few photographs will come out of that part as well…yet the real photographs will come like this…the way they always have with me…for sure i could have done none of the Robles family pictures if anyone had been with me no matter how well intended their presence…

i leave in the morning for home..i will do a tech review along with the portfolio i will present…i had four different cameras and have thoughts on all of them….

MW

i used no lights of any kind except those provided by whomever designed this parking lot by my hotel…picture shot straight up as i said goodnight….this is a nod to new tech though…3200iso and still super quality is one of the new things i do embrace….

The top one.. along with the bottom one on “Dogs” post are the two pictures that, of those we have seen and just to me, fall into the “keepers” section, that I see even when not looking at them.. no matter if they will end up in the book or whatever will come out of all this.. keepers..

David, this family would certainly be a piece of a story about the hollowing out of the middle class by rapidly escalating redistribution of wealth to the very wealthy in the U.S. Many folks just don’t get it that individuals and corporations didn’t contribute the $6 billion the current presidential campaigns will have collectively cost without attaching strings.

As for the current crop of high ISO cameras. Beats the heck out of trying to do this stuff with K200, doesn’t it!

i don’t see or think on education only in an utilitaristic way, i mean, as the main source of jobs only, but even if you do so, it becomes more or less obvious that some things dont come along to achieve just trough loosening the economy… you dont only need money to work on electronics and improve for instance the sensor of a camera, you need smart and well prepared people as well…

For latin america Mexico has the topest ranks in certain educational areas, but it is not easy for profesionals at certain grade levels to validate studies from country to country due to a lack of standarization agreements.

i’m not so sure about, but i think i can remember on the interview you make to Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris-Webb when Violet Island was presented on Burn… you asked if they were out to shoot together, and if i’m not wrong the answer was that they tried but it didn’t work so well so they used to walk alone and meet later to edit together…

-If you want US armed forces home from Afghanistan, not deployed to yet another middle-eastern country, vote for Obama
-If you make less than $250,000 a year and DONT want your taxes raised, vote for Obama
-If you’re a young adult and for whatever reason cannot get decent health insurance on your own and would like to stay on your parents, vote for Obama
-If you would like your mother, sister, girlfriend, wife and niece to have the best choice of health care, vote for Obama
-If regulations to keep in check rampant greed and corruption from bankers, wall street execs, CEOs and the like appeals to you, vote for Obama
-If Peace and Prosperity for the next four years is important to you, vote for Obama

-If you would prefer the exact opposite from everything above…. Mitt Romney is your man.

Eva, you are making a common error in your thinking about the American education system. You are assuming that the point of the American education system is education, whereas in reality the American education system is a jobs program for adults; if the kids learn something along the way that’s nice, but it’s not really the object of the exercise.